ABSTRACT

In keeping with the volume’s theme of ‘genre’, this chapter will examine how the digressive content of the Variae represents Cassiodorus’ reception and unique adaptation of a tradition for encyclopedic exposition. This chapter considers how the concept of varietas, especially as presented in the two prefaces of the Variae, derives from a long tradition for encyclopedic treatises and sympotic dialogues in ancient and late antique literature. The varietas of this ‘genre’ performed a specific rhetorical function by acting as an organizational principle for knowledge and by communicating the attachment of the text to a particular moral authority associated with encyclopedic knowledge. The varietas of encyclopedic exposition was a discursive performance of knowledge that claimed to be holistic and didactic. Rather than a mere stylistic habit, varietas was a mode of envisioning universality and a harmonious natural (and political) order. Cassiodorus’ importation of this tradition into epistolary form relates to specific political and cultural circumstances of the sixth century. This challenges some assumptions about the value of the Variae as purely documentary witnesses to the Gothic government of Italy. As this chapter will argue, Cassiodorus’ two prefaces to the Variae signal his intention to appeal to an audience’s understanding of the cultural function of epistolary and encyclopedic writing. Whatever the historical context of the original letters, the subsequent collection known as the Variae should be understood as a rhetorical literary enterprise.